It's about time. As reported in the NYT: The House voted this evening to rescind $14 billion worth of tax breaks and subsidies for oil drillers and channel the money into a fund that would finance renewable energy projects and new technologies for conserving energy. Despite opposition from the oil…
I got riled up while reading the latest Utne Reader by an article by Keith Goetzman entitled “Houston, We Have a Problem“. He eloquently argues that we should stop wasting money on space research and spend it solving problems here on Earth.
Let’s look at the numbers. What fraction of a percent of our national budget is spent on space? NASA got about $16B in 2005 (including military allocations) out of $2,200B Federal revenues. That’s 0.72%, leaving only a paltry 99.28% to deal with problems here on Earth. I’m ignoring the record-high deficit spending that makes the NASA fraction even smaller. Look the numbers up yourselves. Check my assertions.
We could spend that little fraction on some other issues here at home. But how will we solve problems such as the next major asteroid impact? Yes, it will happen; we just won’t know when. How will we solve the problem of running out of {pick your resource}? Anything we need down here (or a reasonable substitute) can be found up there. After we build a space elevator, it would be cheaper to get it from up there than to dig it up here now! But, this project would necessarily be a crash program about as expensive as — and probably longer lasting than — a war in the middle east and it’s aftermath. Of course, the space elevator would employ a comparable number of people in a third world location that a hypothetical war on Iraq would kill …
Michael Moore recently published this pledge in the Los Angeles Times. I applaud each of these twelve points: 1) We will always respect you. We will never, ever, call you "unpatriotic" simply because you disagree with us. In fact, we encourage you to dissent and disagree with us. 2) We…
Bill Moyers wrote that "it has been said that the mark of a truly educated person is to be deeply moved by statistics." To the extent that this is true, go hither and understand the world through the statistics presented by "Worldometers." Lots of thought-provoking statistics kept up to the…
Okay, so we all would like to save the planet, save the environment, and save a buck on heating and cooling. The price of heating gas is rising. So, how can I decide whether electric heaters are more cost effective than the gas furnace? How do I compare gas company…